Configuration

To configure available Groovy installation on your system, go to Jenkins configuration page, find section 'Groovy' and fill the form as shown bellow.

Usage

To create Groovy-based project, add new free-style project and select "Execute Groovy script" in the Build section, select previously configured Groovy installation and then type your command, or specify your script file name. In the second case path taken is relatively from the project workspace directory.

The plugin also adds the functionality of the Script Console to the project configuration page. You can schedule your system management script...

...and then observe progress in the build log.

Groovy Script vs System Groovy Script

The plain "Groovy Script" is run in a forked JVM, on the slave where the build is run. It's the basically the same as running the "groovy" command and pass in the script.

The system groovy script, OTOH, runs inside the Hudson master's JVM. Thus it will have access to all the internal objects of Hudson, so you can use this to alter the state of Hudson. It is similar to the Jenkins Script Console functionality.

Security

System groovy jobs has access to whole Jenkins, therefore only users with admin rights can add system groovy build step and configure the system groovy script. Permissions are not checked when the build is triggered (i.e. also uses without admin rights can also run the script). The idea is to allow users run some well defined (defined by admin) system tasks when they need it (e.g. put slave offline/online, when user wants to start some debugging on slave). To have Jenkins instance secure, the support for Token macro plugin has to be switched off, see section bellow.

Token macro plugin support

By default, the support for token macro pressing is switched off and has to be switch on in global config page.

If token macro processing via Token Macro Plugin is allowed, the evaluation of macro is done in System Groovy, therefore any user can run arbitrary system script, regardless he has administer permission!

Known bugs

Configuring more builders at once actually doesn't absolutely work. If you need more groovy builders in your project, you have to configure them one by one and always save project configuration before you add new one.